Spiritual Expression Agreement

12/10/01

With the great diversity in spiritual beliefs within the community, we want to ensure that everyone has ample opportunity to freely express their spirituality, but we also want to ensure that everyone is free from participating in undesired spiritual expression. These two objectives will sometimes be at odds with each other, but we can strike a balance if we practice respect and tolerance – respect for what others believe or don’t believe and tolerance of their expressions of those beliefs.

Spiritual expression is looked at in much the same way as other forms of expression and is accorded the same rights and responsibilities. The community will allow common facilities to be used for spiritual expressions, but participation will be completely voluntary and should be easy for people to opt out of if they don’t want to participate. The ease of opting out of a particular spiritual expression depends upon a combination of factors, including its location, duration, size, and intensity.

Using musical expression as an analogy, you can play your music, but if someone asks you to turn it down, they should be respected. Along these same lines, we should strive to be tolerant of each other’s spiritual expression that we are exposed to just as we would be tolerant of someone else’s musical tastes when they play a song that we don’t like. If a particular spiritual expression makes others feel so uncomfortable and not at home even after working with it personally, that they feel a need for it to be moderated or not done at all, we view the resulting discussion and resolution as an opportunity to become a closer and deeper community.

Spiritual expression in private homes and in common spaces does not mean that the community endorses any particular spirituality, only that we endorse the free expression of spiritual belief.